Kushner, a 2013 Academy Award nominee for his Lincoln screenplay, wrote SLAVS! in 1994, shortly after he received the 1993 Pulitzer for his epic Angels in America.

“A lesser writer would have followed [Angels] with something smug and sweeping. As though Kushner feared such a fate, he instead has returned to where he started: a place of healthy confusion,” wrote Marc Robinson of The Village Voice. “Kushner’s humor buoys his political anguish, his lyricism draws dry ideas into rhapsodies and elegies, his interest in character won’t let even the most vaudevillian individual conform to type.”